Today was a crazy mixture of good and strange.

James and I had to be up early to get to Hair Day. We weren't going to be able to stay for lunch because he had to be at his club Christmas party today. Well, we did a stupid. James took his blood sugar, took his insulin, we fed the dog, we fed the bird, but we didn't feed either of us. So no sooner did he get his hair cut than his blood sugar crashed. I had to feed him two of the chocolates we brought and a can of Coca-Cola before he even got as high as 67. Plus on the way to Ron and Lin's he had barked his knuckles on his keys, and his skin is very sensitive on his hands since his first heart attack, so a tiny little spot kept bleeding. By the time we got home, he was back "on line" so to speak, but he ate a burrito and took his blood pressure to make sure it was okay, and I cleaned up the cut and rebandaged it, so he went off to the party as scheduled.

I was planning to go out to Betsy's Hallmark at East Cobb, but all the traffic was so bad that I just got exasperated and quit. Instead I drove to downtown Marietta, found a parking space in the square after two orbits, and wandered around for a bit. I went into The Corner Shop and bought a Terry's dark chocolate orange (there are other sliced chocolate oranges, but Terry's are the best) and some mint sauce for the next time we have lamb. Then I picked up my favorite Zesty Italian pretzels in The Local Exchange. On a whim, looking for sugar-free taffy for James, I went into the candy store, and was delighted to find Mint Juleps! These are squares of mint taffy that I remember buying from the penny candy counter at Tom's Superette when I was in the single digits. The Vermont Country Store used to sell them, then quit, and I couldn't find them online, so I thought they'd quit making them. Looks like Necco makes them now. I got a whole bag, which should last for months.

Finally I did a Christmas stroll around DuPre's antiques. I sadly noticed that they have removed the old receipts and waybills and price lists from around one of the doors, from when DuPre's was a hardware store. At Christmas they always pull out antique Christmas items or put little trees up in the different antique dealers' bays, and the decorations make me smile. Someone had crocheted bunnies for sale that looked just like Elizabeth's stuffed rabbit in The Bestest Present.

Then back to the car, which needed gas. I filled up at Kroger and since I was there, stopped for milk and sodium-free mushrooms, but they were out of the latter. They had a sale on pork loin roasts, $2/pound, so I got one.

Finally home. Yesterday at Publix I had found a little $2 package of pork rib tips. I cooked them in olive oil and basted them in Sweet Georgia Brown barbecue sauce and a little bourbon pineapple sauce. They were quite good and I put two aside. Then I felt like watching the Winona Ryder version of Little Women and that's what I was doing when James came home from his party, having had a good time and made out well at the "Dirty Santa" (gift exchange) game.

When the movie was over, we went out to MicroCenter and bought James a new computer. He looked at a Dell, but in the end he got one like mine, except his has a separate video card. Since he does game occasionally this works better for him. We got the computer home and cleaned out under the desk where the CPU sits, discarding a couple of old devices and putting a new network cable on it (the other was too short and kept pulling the router over backwards). James got into it quickly, but then the internet connection slowed to a crawl for no reason I can tell. This is like the third hour it's been updating, and it's only 89 percent. I've rebooted the modem twice and it speeds up and then immediately slows down again. We really need to install the new unit, but James wanted to wait after we got his computer up and running. It's getting old fast.

Then we tried to watch Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon off the DVR. Well, the satellite box has gone crazy. We'd watch about a minute of the show and then the DVR, on its own, would change the channel to 0 and we'd get ABC and that awful I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown was on to add insult to injury. I unplugged the unit and it didn't seem to make any difference, but it straightened out after I pressed the reset button. Well, at least for a while. We got to watch both shows, and the minute I deleted Young Sheldon the "0" thing started happening again. At first I though it was the remote getting stuck, but the box turned itself off and on when I started to change the batteries and the remote was empty! Dammit, the DVR still has a bunch of stuff on it I want to watch, movies I recorded when they had free HBO and Showtime weekends. I hope we don't have to replace it.

Labels: Christmas, computers, food, friends, shopping, television, traffic

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:39:00 PM

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